Results for: “Self Help”

Lou waited. “Okay, what is it?” he asked. “What is this final step you’re talking about?”

“Gwyn,” Yusuf said, “do you remember your dad’s favorite word?”

“Too well, I’m afraid,” she smirked.

“What does her father have to do with it?” Lou asked, impatiently.

“Actually, Lou, he has everything to do with it.”

“How so?”

“Gwyn is Ben Arrig’s daughter.”

Lou wouldn’t have been more surprised had the Easter Bunny come through the door. Jaw muscles went slack around the room.

“Don’t be too impressed,” Gwyn said in the silence of the gawking gazes, “Sometimes our parents are the last people we can hear, you know?” she said, mostly to herself.

Heads nodded everywhere.

“My ears have been closed to my dad’s ideas for years. ‘Don’t try to feed your philosophy to me,’ I used to tell him when he tried to suggest that I think of things a different way. He thought I should give up the hate I have for my former husband, forgive a sister who has wronged me, and rethink my opinions on race. But he was my dad. What did he know?”

I RECENTLY SAW A LOCAL NEWS STORY ABOUT A BOY WHO became lost in the Colorado woods in the dead of winter. As hypothermia set in, he saw emerging ghostlike out of the swirling snow two large elk. Feebly, he threw stones at them, shouting until his voice gave way, then lost consciousness. Early the next morning, he awoke to find himself sandwiched between the two great beasts, which had laid their warm bodies next to his through what would have been a fatal, freezing night.

Or so he told the search team when he staggered into a clearing and was rescued. They were skeptical—hallucinations are a side effect of extreme duress—until he led them back to his sleeping spot. There, in the snow, they saw the concavities made by two enormous animals, the imprint of a small boy in between.

Why would the animals bother? Why not just curl up with each other for some languorous elk-frolic through the wintry night? (Three’s a crowd, and besides, in these parts people shoot them.) There are a million stories of our fellow creatures being kind to us for no good reason—from dogs who, with no rescue training and at risk to their own lives, rush into the flames of burning buildings to drag strangers to safety; or dolphins who nose drowning swimmers to the surface, wait for human help to arrive, then take off with an errant tip of a flipper. There are inexplicable ways compassion radiates through the world, some spirit of sympathy drawn toward any distress like white cells to a pathogen. When William Wordsworth spoke of "a motion and a spirit that...rolls through all things,” he was talking about the systole and diastole of some universal heartbeat.

Over breakfast a few days later, Grace told me about what had happened with Jennifer, the young woman she’d been having so much trouble with at work. Grace even apologized for calling me during the day just to vent.

“I kept the Choice Map on my desk all day,” Grace said. “Two Learner questions kept jumping out at me—What do I want for myself, for others, and for the situation? And What are my choices? When I applied those questions to Jennifer, I realized I wanted her to start showing more common sense and initiative. So, I tried some new questions. I asked myself Why does Jennifer need so much direction from me? I became truly curious after I realized I didn’t know. Was she afraid of acting on her own? Or worried that I’d fire her for making a mistake? I also wondered whether she had more going for her than I’d given her credit for. The next time she came to me for help I asked her a question instead of just giving her instructions. I inquired with real curiosity, ‘How would you solve this problem if you were the boss?’

Our brains are magnificent and powerful organs with ultra-fast processing speeds. A team of researchers using the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world—the K computer at the Riken research institute in Kobe, Japan—simulated one second of human brain activity. They did so by creating an artificial neural network of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses. While this is impressive, the researchers were not able to simulate the brain’s activity in real time. In fact, it took 40 minutes with the combined muscle of 82,944 processors in the K computer to get just 1 second of biological brain processing time.2

In order to operate at this breakneck speed, your brain uses shortcuts. It reflexively assesses a situation and tries to make meaning. One such shortcut is our instinctual fight, flight, or freeze response in the face of a perceived threat. Consider a situation where you are being chased down the street by the neighborhood pit bull. Your brain signals danger. Your brain then floods your body with chemical impulses that tell your body to fight, flee, or freeze. All of this happens in an instant, without your conscious thought.

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

—ATTRIBUTED TO W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Now that you have read how a group of teenagers reacted to the Reality Model, I would like to complete the process of understanding the remaining five natural laws that are critical to using the model effectively.

Here are two powerful facts about the Reality Model:

1. It places responsibility for behavior smack on the human being, where it belongs. I give this as my opinion: There arrives a point in our lives when we must take total responsibility for our behavior. Do you buy that?

2. You can be very confrontational when attacking somebody’s Belief Window, because you’re not attacking the person, you’re attacking the Belief Window. You’re attacking something they can fix.

The third natural law: Growth is the process of changing principles on your Belief Window.

Corporate America spends $70 billion a year training its workers. Why? Why do corporations send their people to seminars and training? To make them perform better and help them improve their behavior, right?

“Where does the time go?” Wherever it goes, “tempus fugit”—that’s how it gets there. It flies, in a hurry. Also, “time is of the essence.” From a dreamcrafting point of view, this is especially true.

Aspirational fields do more than create alignment between the otherwise random elements of daily life—they also (and perhaps more importantly) bring past, present, and future into alignment. Out of a sense of purpose comes a clear connection between things being done now in order to achieve other things later.

It is easy to recognize the unaligned life: waking hours are divided between work that delivers little or no satisfaction, and leisure time largely spent watching other people pursue their life missions. What we broadly call entertainment, in all its forms, is the product of artists and technicians operating within their own aspirational fields; actors, for example, who crafted a dream career for themselves, and as a result are now well paid to portray characters pursuing a dream.Virtually everything we use, view, listen to, or in some way consume during our leisure time is the output of someone else’s dream, the product of someone else’s life-in-alignment. It’s disheartening to contemplate the millions of lives that completely lack any such alignment, that are not driven by any focused sense of purpose, and for which existence is largely reduced to a passive process of consumption rather than an active process of creation. In any discussion about the seeming “scarcity” of time, it’s disheartening to contemplate the amount of time an entire culture collectively wastes in its consumption of mass-produced simulations of experience and achievement. Invariably, those people who “catch fire” with a burning sense of mission soon find themselves investing much less of their time consuming the product of other people’s dreams, and more time in the pursuit of their own.

A few days into my journey, still kicking against nature,I swung at what turned out to be poison oak.

I cursed my carelessness andmy anticipated discomfort and pain.

Truly all creation is against me, I murmured.

Later that day, I tripped in a bone-dry creek bed,smashing my knee against a rock.I remember grimacing in pain toward an empty sky.

As I lay there, I recalled words my father had spoken to mewhile on a hunt: “WE who lose our footing have lost ourway,” he had said. “Our walking is in darkness.”

What did he mean by walking in darkness? I wondered, asI picked myself up and limped on my way. And what diddarkness have to do with stumbling in daylight?

Despite my anger toward my father, in that moment I had toaccept that I had seen my father, and the great ones amongour people, sure-footed and rooted upon the earth as anytree or plant, yet as light as a seed upon the wind.

This memory awakened my life to lightand for a moment brightened a son’s hurting heart.

Young friend, each morning offers lessons in light.For the morning light teaches the most basic of truths:

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

—Viktor Frankl95

Difficult challenges and difficult feelings are an inevitable part of life. Sometimes things can seem so dark and gloomy that it may be all we can do just to carry on with our work and lives. These times are especially challenging when our efforts lack a sense of purpose. Eventually we must all face the questions: “What has my life contributed of lasting value? What was it all about? Why was I here at all?” And when these times come, we will be greatly aided if we have exercised the emotional discipline to harness the power of purpose.180

In his book The Power of Purpose, Richard Leider wrote:

Purpose is that deepest dimension within us—our central core or essence—where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Purpose is the quality we choose to shape our lives around. Purpose is a source of energy and direction.96

Indeed, when life is its most challenging, we need a sense of meaning and purpose to provide us with the energy and direction that can help us sustain ourselves. But what can provide us with the sense of purpose we need? One primary source of purpose is service to others that is driven by an altruistic spirit. For those who might question the realism of prescribing altruistic service as a valuable source of finding meaningful purpose in our seemingly self-centered world, a creative perspective on the subject was proposed years ago.181

There is nothing more powerful than a question. The reason is that the mind can’t ignore a question. It may choose not to answer, but the question will still be there, provoking new thoughts. Answers, on the other hand, are closed-ended. You can know them and file them away and never think of them again. They don’t require any further thought. That’s probably why people find them comforting.

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Questions open the doors to inquiry, which is how we imagine and discover new possibilities. Growth comes not from having the definitive answer but from the activity of being engaged in the conversation around a great question.

So what is a great question, and how do you make your questions bigger than your answers? Great questions are open-ended—that is, they don’t have easy answers. A really great question can keep you thinking and growing for a lifetime.

Dan shares this story:

When I was nine years old, I was walking in the corn-fields of my family’s farm in Ohio. It was a beautiful, clear late afternoon in winter. The sun was still out, but you could see the moon coming up, and there was snow on the ground. As I walked, a plane flew overhead. Looking up and watching it pass by in this big open sky, I suddenly had an expanded sense that anything was possible, and I thought to myself, “I wonder, how far can I go?”

Better keep yourselfclean and bright; you are thewindow through which youmust see the world.

George Bernard Shaw

The following are examples of the metal voice. Can you hear them in your imagination?

The Wicked Witch of the West screeches from the movie screen, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”

A bluegrass singer croons along with his banjo on a porch in the Appalachian Mountains.

Ethel Merman belts out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” on a Broadway stage that doesn’t have any microphones.

A Siamese cat improvises her own opera in an echoing hallway at three in the morning.

Willie Nelson kicks off “On the Road Again” to a cheering country music festival crowd.

The cartoon character Roadrunner evades the Coyote once again with a triumphant “Beep-beep!”

Madonna prances around the stage singing “Material Girl.”

The metal voice reverberates in what many vocal coaches call “the mask”—the area around the nose, eyes, and forehead. It focuses the sound in your sinus cavities, which act as powerful amplifiers for the vibrations your vocal cords make. These piercing sounds can be an intense experience as they ricochet around inside your head. I call the metal voice “the cheapest sound in the mall” because it uses only a tiny amount of breath to create a great big sound.

I used to have a problem. I didn’t know when to keep my mouth shut. I challenged authority more than was healthy for me or my career. Fortunately, someone helped me overcome my behavioral addiction. He was a colleague of mine and also a good friend. At first, he just pointed things out to me after they’d happened. We’d have lunch after a team meeting and he’d say to me, “Do you know that you shouldn’t have said that the new policy is stupid?” I’d tell him that I realized it after the fact, and that would be that. We’d have a meeting. I’d say something challenging to my manager or about senior management. My friend would admonish me for it afterward, and I’d keep on doing what I was doing. I was finding it beyond my power to stop the behavior on my own.

66 Then he did something different. He sat next to me in a meeting, and every time he saw me getting frustrated, he would step on my foot. He knew the signs that meant I was about to say something detrimental to my career. It worked. It stopped me and forced me to think about what I wanted to say. I still challenged things when I felt strongly enough about them, but my challenges were more thoughtful and less antagonistic. We should all be so lucky to have friends who voluntarily step up to support our needs. The simple truth is that significant change requires help.

I took a run at “becoming spiritual” in my early thirties. Raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, I had studied religion in college, theological seminary, and graduate school. Intellectually, I had no problem embracing some of Christianity’s key tenets, such as grace, forgiveness, incarnation, and life overcoming death. Nor did I have any problem taking a pass on the arrogantly judgmental parts of some streams of Christian tradition, or affirming the vital role of science in our lives. I’ve always understood faith and reason to be partners, not enemies.

But I yearned for something deeper and truer than a head full of religious ideas, no matter how sound. I wanted a lived experience of a life that was less messy than the one I had, full as it was of confusions and contradictions that fell far short of “spiritual.” Or so I thought.

One day, I listened to a taped talk that Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, had given to a roomful of would-be monks at the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton was novice master. Addressing the super-pious young seekers in his care, Merton said, “Men, before you can have a spiritual life, you’ve got to have a life!”

They are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit. (Matt. 15: 14)

Jesus presents a simple commonsense idea in this passage. It contains a lesson that is well worth considering deeply by anyone who aspires to lead others. It raises important questions such as the following: Are you about to lead others blindly into a pit? Are your followers better equipped to lead themselves than to follow you? Do people who live with their problems day in and day out see their situation more clearly than anyone else? How blind are you to the real issues that need to be addressed in this leadership situation? Can you lead others to see their own situations more clearly so they can practice more effective self-leadership? Is the ultimate act of leadership to facilitate others so they can lead themselves? Is it presumptuous, maybe even preposterous, to assume that an external leader can exercise leadership that is more effective than that person’s own self-leadership?